SWT JOGL

Current Release: 0.6
(Release date 24 October 2006).

JOGL (Java OpenGL) is the formal bindings to OpenGL developed through
JSR 231. The bindings
have some dependencies on AWT, though most of the APIs that are important do
not, making it relatively easy to support an SWT version of the same. We have
developed an implementation of the API that will handle the SWT widgets
in addition to the existing AWT set.

This code is currently in a very early release cycle. The initial development
has come from using Sun's reference implementation and modifying it to work
with SWT Canvas instances rather than AWT. As part of this, we stripped out
most of the AWT handling (particularly that which was causing problems on Macs)
and replaced it with SWT equivalents where needed. Right now we're operating
using a reasonably modified version of the RI code in order for our own code to
work correctly. Many of these changes are incompatible, particularly relating
to the Mac. The standard Java AWT uses Cocoa for the windowing toolkit, while
SWT uses Carbon. The result is that we have to build our own AGL bindings and
then the rest of the libraries from there on up end up being quite different.

Downloading and using

We offer two ways of using the code. You can grab either of these options from
our downloads page

Standalone: If you are developing a standalone SWT application then you
can grab the JOGL implementation for that. The API is nothing more than
what you already see in the standard JSR-231 javadoc. You may use either
your own custom Canvas, the new SWT GLCanvas or our own GLCanvas
implementation.

Eclipse Plugin: We've pre-packaged all the requirements you'll need to use
our code as an Eclipse plugin. There are several pre-requisites, including
needing at least SWT 3.2M3. We've bundled these all up into a big zip file so
that all you need to do is drop them into your Eclipse plugins directory and
you'll have instant access to all the capabilities of the SWT binding.

If you are interested in working at a higher level than raw OpenGL commands and
would like to use a scene graph, we recommend using our
Aviatrix3D project in version 2.0 and
later. This has the capability of working over the top of the SWT bindings to
provide a native SWT scene graph for opengl rendering and also may function as
an Eclipse plugin.

We maintain our code under the same SVN repository as the rest of this site.
If you'd like to download our code, please visit the
SVN information page for more
information. Right now our modified JOGL source is not part of that download
because we're waiting to see whether Sun take the code or not. If not, we'll
offer our own version of it here. Both codebases are using the
BSD license
(Sun,
SWT). If you would like to compile our
modified version of the RI look at the jogl_ri repository. It
works on quite a different setup to what we use normally, so there will be
quite a bit of extra work to get it set up.

This release is for Win32 and OSX. Other platforms should be made
available fairly rapidly.